5 thoughts on “CloudSynth – The First SoundCloud Synthesizer”

I grabbed it as soon as I read the name “Alessandro Contini” hoping it was a typo for Alessandro CoRtini. Alas, that is no typo, and this 1.0 release is hard to recommend. Almost immediately I encountered a problem where it was unable to download a sample and I ended up with ear raping pain.

The levels in this thing are all over the place, with previews coming out way louder than the samples when in use, but god help you if a sample fails to load. It tries to use what it has, and helpfully plays it as soon as you switch back to the keyboard before hitting a note. Unfortunately that is noise and garbage played about 10x louder than the notes usually sound. I ripped out my ear buds and could still hear it clearly from a foot away. Some weirdness happened when I tried to clear that out and had to relaunch the app.

The reverb is also prone to going crazy loud with feedback. The waveform view for the granular stuff does not scale nicely, so anything longer than 4 seconds and you’ll have a hell of a time trying to wrangle transients trying to make them not pop/click on every note.

All that said, it is a neat idea. You search SoundCloud for small samples and you can instantly start playing with them. I hope they pursue further development to refine what they have here!

something to think about

There was suddenly all this software. If you weren’t musically inclined it made it possible for you to sound like a musician. That’s what has totally revolutionized the industry. This is not about going to music school or learning music theory, it’s about passion, experimentation and letting it go. But ultimately, I don’t think any particular form of technology is as revolutionary as the person using it.— Derrick May